“Yes, I guess it is.”
They were both quiet, the only sound their breathing, a give and take, a silent exchange. It felt like a weirdly intimate moment, and yet Abby didn’t understand it at all. What did Simon want? What did she want? She had no idea why he’d called.
“Look, I know what you said the other day and I respect it,” he finally said. “I’m not going to write a book or dig up your family secrets and wave them about for all and sundry to see. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to hurt you, Abby. I hope you believe me about that.”
“But?” she said after a moment, because there so obviously was one.
“But I’ve found some things out, and I think you deserve to know what they are. At least, you deserve the right to decide if you want to know.” He paused while Abby tried to think of something to say. “Whatever your choice, Abby, I will respect it.”
“Will you?” She gazed out the window at the backyard, its colors seeming muted under a humid, gray sky that pressed down on the earth.
“Yes, I will.”
Simon was silent, waiting for her verdict, and Abby wondered what he wanted her to say. She felt so tired—tired of it all. Tired of her father’s silence, of tiptoeing across the painful cracks of their relationship, of trying to be happy when something in her wanted to weep and weep and yet never could. She hadn’t even realized just how tired she’d been, until Simon.
Until Simon.
Maybe he was little more than a stranger, yet he was already important, if just for that—except, of course, it wasn’t just for that. She’d been backing away from life for the last fifteen years. Maybe now it was finally time to stop.
“All right,” she said, her voice heavy with the weight of her words. “Tell me what you’ve found out.”
Chapter Seventeen
Normandy, France
June 1944
“He’s ready for you, Lawson.”
Matthew flicked his cigarette onto the road and ground it beneath his boot, the acrid smell of the tobacco still stinging his nostrils. He hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in his life until two days ago, when he and Tom had finally joined up with a raggedy section of the 508th, everyone milling about the battered buildings of an abandoned village, soldiers seeming both dazed and impatient. The assault had started, and yet there was nothing to do.
The jump, Matthew had discovered, had gone rather disastrously wrong. Most of the men had been dropped miles from the right place, and many of them were still stumbling around alone in the fields and forests of France, if they hadn’t been killed or captured. Meanwhile, the sea assault had gone ahead, with massive casualties but tattered success, and yet now that they were actually in France, it felt like the next step hadn’t been planned.
Matthew knew the 508th’s main objective had been to capture Sainte-Mère-Église, secure crossings of the Merderet River, and establish a defensive line north of Neuville-au-Plain. Whether any of that would happen now was in serious question. He suspected the main objective of all the regiments was simply to assemble together and figure out what the hell they were doing.
But none of that concerned him now; although there had been several exchanges of fire, Matthew hadn’t been involved in any of them. He was deemed too valuable to be lost to a stray bullet or hidden landmine. He was one of the few people in the Allied army who knew German, and who could get military intelligence from one of the hundreds of captured soldiers now in their charge.
Straightening his shoulders and narrowing his eyes against the glare of the midda
y sun, he walked towards the empty bar where the soldier he was to interrogate had been brought. No one knew anything about him except he was of low rank, the equivalent of a private, and he seemed terrified.
Unconsciously, Matthew clenched and unclenched his fists as he stood before the wooden door leading into the pub. This would be his first real interrogation, so different from the many practice ones he’d done back at Camp Ritchie, when the “prisoner” had been his instructor or a fellow student, simply pretending to be a German soldier, acting either surly or scared. Even though Matthew had taken it all with the utmost seriousness, he knew now it had never truly felt real.
Not like this, when a latent fury was coursing through him, and he willed it into something colder and more solid. There was no room for emotion here. He’d been told that many times over the course of his training, and he knew it now.
He opened the door and stepped inside.
The bar was dim, a few tables scattered around, most of the chairs broken, everything covered with dust. Whoever had been patron of this place had left long ago.
Matthew blinked to adjust himself to the gloom and then saw the man sitting at a table in the center of the dusty room. He stared at Matthew uncertainly, his eyes wide. Matthew regarded him back coolly.
The man was young, no more than a kid, maybe nineteen or twenty. Blue eyes blinked at him rapidly and his blond hair was cut short.
Matthew reached into his jacket pocket.
“Zigarette?” he asked casually, proffering the pack, and the man blinked at him.
“D-d-danke… ja,” he stammered, and took one of the cigarettes from the pack. He put it between his lips as Matthew leaned forward with his lighter. “Danke,” he murmured again, and drew deeply on the cigarette. Matthew remained silent and the boy eyed him with obvious curiosity. “Are you German?” he asked, speaking his native tongue.